Well, I am not sure about the candidate thing, but it crashes when ever there is a primary. I have to continually save, and I was able to get around some of the earlier ones to progress my campaign now to the Louisiana GOP primary, and find my game now stuck there, as I cannot proceed without another address crash.
I have yet to get to a single general election as I always run into this issue that cripples the game.

I am getting an unacceptable amount of crashes with this game. Access violation at address 00000000. Read of address 00000000
sometimes loading a saved game will let me get past the day where the game crashes, sometimes it doesnt.
And I cannot tell you how annoying and frustrating it is to spend so much time in a campaign to then have the thing unable to progress because of errors like this.

a career mode.
What this means to me is I pick a candidate, run for President. Chances are, I don't get the nomination, but then I can work an try and get my party's nominee elected. If he is, then I get a bit of a bump to my own status, be it integrity, organiziation, whatever. Then in 4 or 8 more years depending (or I guess give me the ability to run against an incumbant in the primaries), my candidate is a better candidate from running previously. Hopefully I am better enough to win. Then face re-election.
Not sure how implementing the actual Presidency could work without turning this into a game it is not mean to be, but I would love the ability to grow my candidate over several elections until I finally become the top guy.

I am trying to make something along those lines but the legislature is not the US Senate but a generic body with 70 seats. The only problem is getting the map to work. I just can't seem to figure that one out. When I load the scenario all that happens is error messages about the initilize riding data (can't find province) and the map won't load. Haven't figured out where the bug is.